PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO Graphics Card: the Best in Its Class?. Page 23

Today we are going to introduce to you ATI Radeon X1800 GTO graphics solution that tends to be called the best from the $199-$249 price range. The newcomer has every reason to claim this prestigious title: it features 256bit memory bus and is built on the advanced R520 GPU with the limited number of units. How tense the battle between Radeon X1800 GTO and GeForce 7600 GT is going to be? We will answer this question in our article. The newcomer will be represented by PowerColor X1800 GTO.

Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark05 build 1.2.0

The total score in 3DMark05 shows that PowerColor X1800 GTO is 846 points ahead of GeForce 7600 GT, even though the test uses the default resolution of 1024x768 with disabled FSAA. If we take a closer look at the results of individual benchmarks, we will see where this victory actually comes from.

When FSAA is disabled, PowerColor falls slightly behind GeForce 7600 GT, although in 1600x1200 the lag is not more than 10%. We didn’t quite understand why it happened this way, because the scene of the first benchmark is large enough to benefit from 256-bit memory access. However, once the full-screen anti-aliasing is enabled, the rivals swap places, even though the performance difference between them remains the same 10%.

In Game 2 test that requires efficient work with lighting, shadows and fast vertex shader processing speed, PowerColor X1800 GTO takes the lead right away thanks to 8 fully-fledged vertex processors it features (while GeForce 7600 GT has only 5). With enabled FSAA it also benefits from the more efficient memory subsystem making the advantage between PowerColor X1800 GTO and its primary rival reach 20%-30%.

Game 3 test involves all resources of the graphics card: fast processing of complex pixel shaders, high fillrate and certainly 256-bit memory bus. As a result, PowerColor X1800 GTO is at least as fast as GeForce 7600 GT without FSAA and is 20% faster than the Nvidia solution with FSAA 4x and maximum level of anisotropic filtering.